Converting MOV videos to DVD from iPhone 4S

[jpifer_nc]

I've recorded a couple videos of my kids on my iPhone 4S in HD. From what I have found they are H.264 videos in a MOV container. Not 100% on that.

I'm having a heck of a time getting them converted to DVD format without losing the good quality. I understand that with any transcoding or converting you'll probably lose some quality, but mine are downright terrible, if successful at all.

I've tried different combinations of the following apps:
Free Studio Manager Tools
Mp4Cam2AVI (seemed to do the best job converting to avi without out too much quality loss)
SUPER
FoxTab Video Converter
TMPGEnc
mencoder

Anyone have any suggestions for doing this?

Unfortunately these were the first videos I had taken and some are also upside down. I've been playing around with trying to flip and mirror with mencoder with little success. I'm less concerned about this though. Right now I'd lust like to get the videos converted to DVD with decent quality for future recordings.

As you can see by the list of tools I'm using all free or open source, and I'd like to keep it that way if possible.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,
James

[jman98]

It's certainly not the easiest route to take, but if you want to learn to write AviSynth scripts and feed those into VirtualDub you should be able to get the kind of quality you want as output. If you need a specific output format let us know.

With sufficient bit rates the free HCenc program can produce excellent quality MPEG-2 output but again you need to know how to use AviSynth. Can MeGui work with MOV format input? Don't know but you might look into that as it could give you an easier way to get high quality output.

[jpifer_nc]

I guess I would be looking for MPEG2 quality for a DVD. I will take a look at MeGUI. I saw some references to AviSynth when I was searching, so I will look at that as well.

Thanks,
James

[jpifer_nc]

So I'm looking at the AviSynth wiki. I see I should be able to load the MOV files by creating a file in the same directory like this:
# with audio (in many cases possible with QuickTime 7) QTInput("FileName.mov", color=2, audio=1)Then I could open that file with VirtualDub or hcenc and it would open it.

I assume I would also have another line or lines that does the actual transcoding? I would like to try and transcode to mpeg2. Anyone have an example of this? I see a lot on the wiki for loading files, but not much on this part, or I haven't found it yet.

Thanks,
James

[jpifer_nc]

Found another thread in here that recommended http://www.xmedia-recode.de/. Doesn't help with rotating the video as far as I can see, but otherwise is pretty good.

Thanks,
James